Besides the older interdental cleaners consisting of wood or metal wire, interdental cleaners consisting of plastic are nowadays known, as they are shown and described in EP 0 932 371 A1. Such an interdental cleaner has a rod-shaped carrier consisting of a first, relatively hard and dimensionally stable plastic, which is provided in the front area of its axial length with a coating consisting of a second, soft plastic, for example, a thermoplastic elastomer. On its radially outer side, the coating may have a structuring in the form of knobs or radially outwardly extending fingers in order to increase the cleaning action. The user can grasp the interdental cleaner on a grip section of the rod-shaped carrier and insert the rod-shaped carrier with the coating carrying the structuring into an interdental space and move it there to and fro, as a result of which the interdental space is cleaned and possibly adhering particles are loosened.
It was found that it is advantageous for the cleaning action to be achieved with the interdental cleaner if the deformability of the interdental cleaner is high enough, on the one hand, to clean even difficult-to-reach sections of the interdental space, and, on the other hand, the interdental cleaner must be sufficiently flexurally rigid in order to be able to adequately penetrate into small interdental spaces. Since each user imposes different requirements in this respect on an interdental cleaner, it would be desirable per se to market interdental cleaners with different deformabilities and flexural rigidities. It is, however, necessary for this to keep different injection molds in stock and/or to use different plastic materials and/or to manufacture different geometries of the interdental cleaner. In any case, this is associated with considerable additional costs.